


Promises Mostly Kept

by Mephistophelia



Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Angst, Child Abuse, Every time I try to write about my boys they end up terribly gut-crushingly sad, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Pining, Teenage flashbacks, it's sad, why am I this way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-12 21:11:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12968508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mephistophelia/pseuds/Mephistophelia
Summary: Anatole is perfect. Untouchable. Flawless. Unbroken. Except when he isn't.Fedya does what he can to protect him. But he doesn't realize the pain has to go somewhere.





	Promises Mostly Kept

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, it's me, writing something self-indulgently sad about my boys because I don't want to prep for finals. Again.
> 
> Also, I had to randomly make up a diminutive for Ippolyt because the Kuragins are apparently the only Russian weirdos who name a male child after the Queen of the Amazons. So if you know what the real one is, leave a comment and yell at me?
> 
> I mean, you can comment for other reasons too.

Anatole is perfect.

Almost too handsome, Fedya thinks sometimes. Looking at him straight-on is unsettling. His eyes too blue, his smile too bright. Like staring into the sun.

No life without it. But careful not to look too long.

Anatole is perfect. Untouchable. Flawless. Unbroken.

Except when he isn’t.

#

They meet at a party Anatole’s father hosts in Petersburg, when Fedya is seventeen and Anatole sixteen. Fedya doesn’t want to go, but his mother urges him. “They’re very important people, the Kuragins,” she says, and straightens his waistcoat before shooing him out the door like a clump of dust in front of a broom.

By _very important,_ Fedya knows, she means _very rich._ Useful for him to know them, when they struggle to pay off the landlord every month, when a meal on the table is a prayer and not an expectation. When Prince Vasily Sergeyevich Kuragin invites someone like Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov to a party, Fedya knows he is expected to go and make friends like his life depends on it, because in some ways, it does.

He can’t fathom why they invited him. Not until years later does he realize they didn’t. His mother merely sent him over on the assumption that with the two hundred people crowded into Vasily Kuragin’s ballroom, no one would notice one young man with a threadbare waistcoat and recently polished shoes.

She is quite right. Almost no one does.

Save one person.

Fedya has long suspected he does not have the feelings toward women that his mother expects him to. He has courted a few, kissed a few others. But while he has broken almost every rule the church has decreed, he’s never gone beyond a kiss. Sex is wholly out of the question. He has barely done anything, truly never wanted to.

With one look at the tall, pale boy, wearing a black and gold waistcoat that exerts a force of personality all its own, it quickly becomes clear why this is so.

Suddenly, there is no limit to the number of things Fedya wants to do.

He recognizes the boy by context—must be one of the Kuragins, the youngest one, though he cannot remember the first name, if indeed he has ever known it.

Frankly, in this moment, Fedya can hardly remember his own name.

He calls him Apollo, in his head, unable to come up with something less ridiculous. Though the image is accurate, the boy looks like a god, like the sun.

Fedya sits at the very end of the table, almost in the kitchens. As far from Prince Vasily and his children as he can manage. Hélène, the dark-haired daughter, to Vasily’s left. Ippolyt, the elder son who looks like a miniature of his father, to his right.

To Fedya’s amazement, Apollo strides easily through the dining room and sits beside Fedya. The last seat at the table. Where he’d expected the family nurse to sit, or some illegitimate cousin.

Apollo smiles. Fedya melts. There is nothing left of him but a puddle on the floor.

“Have we been introduced?” Apollo says.

“No,” says the puddle on the floor formerly known as Fedya.

Apollo extends a hand, still smiling. Fedya can hardly bring himself to touch it. Apollo’s palm is warm and soft, with faint calluses along the pads of his fingers. Fedya recognizes their origin—his mother, too, is a violinist.

“Anatole Kuragin,” Apollo says.

Fedya mumbles something unintelligible. Anatole is still holding his hand.

Anatole tilts his head to the side. “Sorry?”

He is still holding Fedya’s hand. Fedya’s hand. He is holding it.

“Fedya Dolokhov,” Fedya manages.

Anatole grins. “Charmed,” he says, and finally takes his hand back.

From that moment, Fedya is. Decidedly.

#

Anatole is seventeen now, Fedya eighteen. Fedya has had the same friends in Petersburg since childhood. But after the party, when Anatole and Fedya spent all night together, drinking too much champagne and making snide comments about the other guests—gradually louder the drunker they became—after that night Fedya abandons all other company. Every moment they are awake and free, they are together, finding new ways to make one another laugh, to make trouble.

That trouble might come while drinking, or it might come before, or after. But a bottle is usually involved, somehow.

Fedya has a working-class style of drinking. He haunts taverns, dimly lit and dirt-cheap. He introduces Anatole to his favorite spots, which Anatole adores with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of an emperor in disguise, briefly living like a common man.

Anatole drinks like a prince: with class, and in volume. They claim a corner of the club as their own. Fedya is not a member, should not be allowed in, but no one has ever been able to refuse Anatole Vasiliyevich and his brilliant smile anything. Together, they spend most evenings there, and most nights, and the first part of most mornings. Sometimes with Anatole’s sister Hélène, who Anatole loves more than life, and who is more entertaining than Fedya originally supposed. More often, they are alone.

Anatole is younger than Fedya, and smaller, but he holds his liquor just as well.

Though never better.

Tonight, Anatole is sprawled across a chair, with his legs kicked up on the table. Fedya sits at his side, pouring out two more shots of vodka. They have bought the whole bottle, which seemed easier on the waitress than having her return every fifteen minutes for another. Although Fedya can tell Anatole wouldn’t mind having the waitress return. He’s watching her now as she leans over the bar, wiping off a stain of either liquor or vomit. The smile on his lips is not remotely subtle.

Fedya burns with envy, then shame at the envy, then anger at the shame. He drains his shot and pours himself another.

Anatole has tossed off his coat and sits relaxed in shirtsleeves. He speaks loosely, hands dancing with the rhythm of his story, which is wilder even than usual. It involves a pair of handcuffs, the back of a three-horse carriage, and a contortionist from the Petersburg circus with—quote— _exquisite tits, Fedya, Christ_. Anatole is not exactly a pillar of morality, but the one sin he’s never been able to master is lying. If he claims to have done this, no doubt he has.

Anatole reaches forward, taking the bottle from Fedya. As he does so, his sleeves edge up past his wrists, just an inch.

Easy to see them, then.

The bruises ring his wrists in twists of black and green. An otherworldly green, like the color of pressing a fist to an eye, spotted with red in the center.

Fedya shouldn’t be looking. This feels private. It feels secret.

He can’t stop looking.

Anatole has noticed. He tugs his sleeves back down, almost to the first knuckle, without interrupting the flow of his sentence.

Fedya reaches out and takes Anatole’s hand.

Anatole falls silent. Fedya has never done this before. He has never dared to touch Anatole first. He has never dared to show that he wants to.

Gently, he pushes Anatole’s left sleeve up to his elbow, still holding his hand. The bruising does not stop at the wrist. It stretches up, some fresh and some fading. In the crook of his elbow, a circular mark discolors the skin, black like ashes, a small burn.

Without knowing why, Fedya circles his thumb along the ridge of the burn.

Anatole flinches and pulls his arm away.

“Who did that?” Fedya asks. He will kill them, whoever it is. For daring to touch Anatole. For daring to hurt him.

“Vodka,” Anatole says, and laughs. He nudges the sleeve back down, fixing the button without looking at it. “I fell. Probably. Honestly, that whole night is a blur, Fedya.”

Vodka. Vodka cannot grab Anatole by the wrist with iron fingers. Vodka cannot bend Anatole’s arm backward until the muscle is strained and sore. Vodka cannot take the burning tip of a cigar and press it into Anatole’s elbow, singing the skin, leaving that tiny perfectly round black stain, like a hole in the universe.

Fedya is still staring at Anatole’s arm.

“It’s nothing,” Anatole says, and smiles. “Let it go.”

Fedya wants to push the point, but doesn’t. Anatole is worse at secrets than he is at lies. Given time, he will blurt out the answer. He always has before.

When Fedya falls asleep just before sunrise, head already aching with tomorrow’s hangover, he thinks of that tiny circular burn, an eye that will not stop watching him.

#

They are going to the opera, the Kuragins. Prince Vasily and Ippolyt and Hélène and Anatole. Anatole’s mother, Princess Aline, has begged off, claiming a headache. Which left an additional ticket, and extra room in the box.

Anatole, in a show of stupid naiveté Fedya knows he should expect by this point, has had an idea of what to do with the extra ticket.

Prince Vasily, to Fedya’s alarm, has agreed.

He greets Fedya at the door, extending one hand to shake Fedya’s. His grip is alarmingly firm. His smile is cold.

“So you’re the famous Fyodor Dolokhov,” Vasily says. “The one my children won’t stop talking about. Hélène, too, but Anatole in particular.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”

The handshake has gone on entirely too long. Fedya’s knuckles ache.

“Fedya!”

Anatole has appeared over his father’s shoulder. He is beaming. His smile seems slightly too bright for honesty. Vasily releases Fedya’s hand at last, and Anatole pulls Fedya into a quick embrace, the kind any friend might give another. Fedya feels the warmth of Anatole’s body pressed against his, the scent of him, warmth and spice and cedar, that he will never admit to dreaming of more nights than not. He breaks off the embrace, aware of Vasily watching from behind.

“I’m glad you could come,” Anatole says, and claps Fedya on the shoulder. “Otherwise I’d be stuck next to Polyshka, and—”

“Stupid child,” Ippolyt says, brushing past Anatole on the way to the waiting carriage, though the gesture seems indulgent rather than annoyed. “As if I’d sit next to you.”

Anatole sticks his tongue out at Ippolyt, who sticks out his own tongue back, with a mocking wrinkle to his nose. Fedya laughs. Anatole and Hélène are closer than life, but he has never been intimate with his brother, who has always struck Fedya as cold, aloof, awkward. It’s nice, he thinks, seeing Anatole and Ippolyt getting along. Or close.

Vasily ushers Hélène through the door toward the carriage and then locks the door behind them. Hélène smiles at Fedya, warmly if not entirely innocently. She knows, Fedya thinks. She’s always known how he feels about her brother, though she’s never told, bless her.

“Don’t pay attention to him,” Anatole says, still scowling at Ippolyt. “He wouldn’t know a quality opera if it bit him in the—”

Vasily strikes Anatole on the back of the head with the flat of his hand. Perfunctory, but hard.

A small yip escapes from Anatole’s lips, like stepping on the tail of a dog.

Then Vasily curls a rough grip around the back of Anatole’s neck and shoves him forward.

Anatole stumbles down the two stairs leading to the street, wrenching his back to stop himself falling before he hits the stone. Even from where he stands, Fedya can see the hot red mark rising on Anatole’s neck, in the shape of Vasily’s hand. Anatole brings his own to it, rubbing the skin almost without thinking. He keeps his eyes low.

“Get moving, Anatole,” Vasily says, and strides past him toward the carriage. “I won’t be late because of you.”

Hélène follows quickly after her father, though she presses Anatole’s shoulder in reassurance as she passes. Anatole bites his lower lip, as if he might cry. Fedya doesn’t know which is worse to him, the pain of his father’s touch, or the humiliation that Fedya has seen, that Fedya knows.

Fedya should have known before.

He moves to stand beside Anatole, who is still looking at the street, as though he might lose himself in the cracks between the stones. Without speaking, he takes Anatole’s hand and holds it in both his own. He wants to press Anatole’s hand to his lips, to kiss it, to kiss him.

He wants.

God, he _wants._

“Tolya,” he says. “He shouldn’t—”

“It’s nothing,” Anatole says sharply. He does not pull his hand away.

“It’s not nothing, you don’t deserve—”

“Anatole,” Vasily shouts from the carriage.

Anatole flinches. Fedya holds Anatole’s hand harder, then releases it, knowing that he must, that he should have long ago.

Together, they cross the street and clamber into the carriage.

Fedya has never cared for the opera, and does not listen to this one. He can think of nothing but the way Anatole edges away from his father. The way Anatole winces when Vasily reaches into his breast pocket and produces a cigar, which he lights during the second act despite the ushers’ vehement protestations.

The way Anatole’s knee is so close to Fedya’s, so close he could lean an inch to the left and they would be touching.

Anatole watches the opera, losing himself in the music, the lights, the fiction of another world away from this one.

Fedya watches Anatole, losing himself in the fiction of him.

#

Fedya never brings up that evening again. Not to Anatole, not to Hélène, not to his mother. He regrets his silence even as he continues to say nothing. But he senses—or, at least, he tells himself he senses—that Anatole doesn’t want to be defended. Anatole wants an escape.

Anatole, it seems, wants Fedya’s drafty apartment, where he begins to spend more of his time.

Fedya’s mother adores Anatole. Says he is a good influence, which may be the most ridiculous sentence Fedya has ever heard in his life. Fedya wants to tell her so. Wants to explain what the handsome prince in their sitting room talked Fedya into doing the night before. Together, they stalked the streets of Petersburg, draining an entire bottle of vodka between them, shouting careless challenges to the stars, before climbing the fence into Anna Mikhailovna’s garden and spelling out the phrase _stuck-up old cow_ in the snow with their own piss.

That memory, Fedya thinks with a blush, is one he had better keep to himself.

(Fedya will see this memory every night for two weeks. He will stare at the ceiling and imagine the flash of Anatole’s bare skin in the night. Anatole might have just undone his fly, as Fedya did, but instead he nudged his trousers halfway down his thighs, as if to say _if you’re going to do the thing, Fedya, do the thing properly._ Fedya will think of the defined shelf between Anatole’s hipbones, the lean strength of his thighs, and of course the other thing, which even to himself he does not have words for. Fedya memorized the sight of Anatole in a flash, and he will recite it to himself in the dark, like a poem, like a rosary.)

But Anatole, scoundrel though he is, can turn on the charm when needed. He kisses Fedya’s mother’s hand, speaks politely, calls her _Madame Dolokhova_ as if she is a countess. He lends them two hundred rubles to fix the hole in the roof, and will not hear of being paid back.

He stays for dinner, more often than he doesn’t. Fedya thinks of the seven-course meal they shared at Anatole’s father’s house, then of the stew and black bread his mother can barely afford, and the flush rises in his face like a bottle rocket. But Anatole never complains, never gives Fedya the impression that he wants to.

After dinner, he and Anatole sit in the front room and talk—impolitely but quietly—as Fedya’s mother sings, cleaning the dishes. Anatole’s fingers ripple across his thigh, picking out silent notes in counter-melody to her voice.

Fedya knows Anatole is a violinist. He feels it reinforced every day in the soft way Anatole hums to himself as he thinks. The way his steps always seem to move in rhythm with something, though no one else can hear it. The way he sees Anatole slow his pace as they pass the small music shop near Nevsky Prospekt, the one with the Stradivarius on display and almost glowing in the front window. But Fedya has never heard him play.

He wants to. It frightens him, how badly he wants this.

He mentions it to his mother, who latches onto the idea. Anatole blushes scarlet as she emerges from the bedroom with a battered violin, a step and a half out of tune, that she hasn’t played in months.

Anatole is never shy about anything around Fedya. Case in point: last evening in the snow, which Fedya will not think about now, not in front of his mother, he won’t do it. No, Anatole is not shy. But as she hands him the violin, he blushes and shakes his head, trying to hand it back.

“I can’t,” he says.

Fedya shakes his head. “Tolya, come on.”

“You know I’m not any good.”

“How can I know you aren’t any good if I’ve never heard you play?”

It will be beautiful, of course. Fedya knows this. Everything Anatole does is beautiful. He can’t seem to help it.

Anatole tucks the instrument under his chin, perching half on the arm of the couch. His hands, as he tunes the strings, shake. He brushes the instrument with the bow as if afraid to be heard. Long fingers dance easily along the pegs, edging the strings where they need to go.

Then, he glances at Fedya and his mother, apologetically.

“If you don’t want me to, say so,” he says.

Fedya scoffs. “Tolya, I’ve been trying to get you to play for a year and a half.”

Anatole smiles. He bites his lower lip—those perfect lips, God, it’s like he does it to distract Fedya, to stop him from having a coherent thought, to force Fedya to think about kissing those lips.

Fedya lingers, briefly, on the faint, unlikely possibility that he’s right about this.

“Well,” Anatole says.

Then, half-standing and half-sitting, with one hip balanced on the sofa, he plays.

Fedya realizes, after thirty seconds, that he is holding his breath.

The music is whirling, almost frenetic, high on the swirl of its own wildness. A waltz, yes, but a waltz unhinged and eerie, with sharp spiraling runs and flourishes that send Anatole’s fingers spidering along the neck of the instrument until he lands, breathless and perfectly in time, in the stately madness of the melody.

Fedya has never been able to coax anything from the instrument, to his mother’s disappointment. He cannot carry a tune in a bucket. But what Anatole is doing with the violin feels like something both more and less than music. It feels more like firing a pistol: perfectly aimed, unsettlingly powerful, the kind of godlike action that leaves you hovering six inches above your body, watching a person who is not you.

This, Fedya understands.

Anatole closes his eyes, his hands guiding him through the piece by touch, by sound. He seems transported. He seems free. He seems, as the song rushes on, almost afraid of the power of it.

Anatole, though nearby, is no longer there.

The sudden distance between them makes Fedya long to press his back up against Anatole’s lean legs, to rest his head on his knees. To let the vibration of the violin pass through Anatole’s fingers, down his arms, into his chest and then into Fedya’s body, until the music is thrumming through both of them, until both their heartbeats have been replaced by this mad, giddy, terrible, frightening waltz.

And then the piece is over, and they are silent.

The final note rings through the quiet room. Then, Fedya’s mother bursts into applause, and the fear in Anatole’s eyes melts into a smile. He looks radiant.

Fedya cannot stop staring at him, this pale, fragile boy, delicate and sharp as glass, this boy with the magic violin.

He is very warm, suddenly. He tugs at his collar.

“ _Danse Macabre_?” Fedya’s mother asks.

Anatole nods and sets the violin tenderly back into the case. “Supposed to be. Right now it’s more _Danse de Merde_.”

Fedya’s mother shakes her head. “Anatole, I’ve never heard it played so well. Honestly, the symphony would take you, if—”

“Papa thinks music is a silly pastime,” Anatole interrupts. “Not what a gentleman should do.” From the sharpness in his voice, it is quite clear the subject is closed.

Fedya winces. Anatole was happy. He was brilliant. And even the memory of his father’s frown could cause him to shrink like this.

Fedya’s mother nods. “Well,” she says, and smiles, not pressing the point, “you must play for us again, when you come. The violin is going to waste, and there’s at least one person here who would be grateful to hear you.”

“Two,” Fedya says, his voice strained.

The gratitude in Anatole’s eyes is beyond the scope of what the Dolokhovs have done.

“Tolya, you’re always welcome here,” Fedya’s mother says. “You, just as you are.”

He smiles, bright and just a little sad, and it is more than Fedya can bear to watch. His mother embraces Anatole, a firm hug that causes Anatole’s breath to hiss through his teeth. She draws back, and Anatole balances there with eyes closed, one arm pressed to his ribs.

If Vasily Kuragin were in the room, Fedya would kill him.

“Anatole,” Fedya’s mother says.

Anatole shakes his head. He has recovered his composure. His smile, when he gives it now, is bright, and charming, and Fedya does not believe it for an instant.

“It’s nothing,” Anatole says. “Come. Let’s talk of something else.”

#

Fedya has always known the army is his future. There is a war on, after all, and he has few prospects. Besides that, he knows he will be a good soldier. He follows orders. His aim is impeccable. He knows what it is to hurt, and how to hurt others. And, other than his mother and Anatole, he’s never had much to lose.

It occurs to him, suddenly, that this is a great deal to lose.

Anatole is nineteen now, Fedya twenty. They have been friends for three years. For three years, Fedya has depended on Anatole, and he suspects Anatole has done the same with him.

Three years, and tomorrow he is leaving for the Caucasus.

They sit together on the roof of Fedya’s building, passing a bottle of vodka between them. Fedya huddles in an old fur coat he’s had for years, one worn at the elbows but warm enough. Anatole has a massive scarf wrapped around his shoulders—knit with large stitches from heavy wool, it looks as if he’s wearing a blanket—and a well-cut jacket that cannot possibly be warm. It is snowing, in a desultory kind of way, but Anatole barely seems to feel the cold. This has little to do with either the scarf or the vodka. Anatole always seems to generate a heat of his own. Fedya doesn’t think his friend has ever been cold in his life.

Fedya is freezing, but he will not leave until Anatole does.

“You’ll be careful?” Anatole says, looking out across the tenement rooftops of Petersburg.

Fedya laughs. “Please,” he says. “I’ll be fine.”

Anatole turns to face him. He has folded his legs, a pose that conspires with the blanket to make him look like a monk atop a mountain. A single snowflake has tangled itself in his left eyebrow. It takes a physical effort for Fedya not to reach out and brush it away.

“Fedya, I want you to promise me,” Anatole says. “Promise me you’ll be fine. And you’ll come home.”

Anatole really thinks it works that way, Fedya realizes. That a man can go off to war and come home safe through sheer force of will. Fedya hasn’t been able to keep Anatole safe a single day, not one, and now Anatole believes he can defy the odds of an entire war.

He doesn’t know what he’s asking. How it sounds. He can’t.

He means nothing by the words. Anatole is asking for a promise from his best friend, from his protector. The way he looks at Fedya now, it is earnest and it is sincere and Fedya knows it means nothing at all.

It would be easier not to care. It would be easier to break it off here, take the opportunity to disappear and leave this fragile, luminous man with his brilliant smile and his haunting eyes.  

But Fedya has never been able to say no to Anatole for anything, when he asks.

“I promise,” he says.

Anatole nods sagely, satisfied. He passes Fedya the bottle, and Fedya drinks. It burns every inch of the way down. The pain feels suitable, somehow.

“Promise me yourself, Tolya,” Fedya says, looking into the bottle.

Anatole laughs, as though Fedya is the one being ridiculous. “Promise you what? I’m not the one rushing at French cannons like an idiot, _mon cher._ ”

Fedya blushes at the term of endearment, as he does every time. But he will not allow Anatole to brush him off.

“You have to keep yourself safe,” Fedya says. “Because if you don’t—”

If you don’t, he thinks, if I come home from the war and something has happened, if you are not there when I come home, I would rather be dead.

Anatole reaches over and brushes one hand against Fedya’s knee. It feels like lightning, like fire, like a promise made and broken at the same time.

“I’m stronger than you think, Fedya,” he says. “I can take care of myself.”

Fedya wants to believe this. He has no choice but to try.

They sit there together, watching snow brush across Petersburg, drinking in silence, until the sun rises. Then, Anatole stands and extends a hand, helping Fedya up. His hands are as warm and soft as ever, despite the years, despite the frigid night. His calluses feel like a map, leading Fedya home.

“Come on,” Anatole says, and squeezes Fedya’s hand.

Together, they climb back through the skylight into the apartment. Soon, Anatole winds his own way home, through the snowy beginnings of daylight. Fedya stands alone for a long moment, feeling the ghostly pressure of Anatole’s hand against his palm.

Then, wearily, he begins to pack.

#

They drift, during the war. Letters help, but they aren’t the same.

At first, Fedya blames Anatole for the distance between them. Lying in his tent at night, he tells himself Anatole can’t bear to think about something as harsh as soldiering. That with Fedya out of sight, he has moved on, because Fedya never meant anything to him, not really.

Deep down, however, he knows this isn’t fair.

He’s the one who holds onto Anatole’s letters for days, weeks, before reading them, and for weeks after that before he answers.

He’s the one who stays awake later than he should, because he doesn’t trust his own dreams.

He’s the one who pushes Anatole away.

He can’t afford not to. Whenever he thinks about Anatole, he can’t think straight. He remembers the shimmer of Anatole’s eyes in the moonlight, the perfect canvas of his bare skin through the night, the dance of his elegant fingers across the violin—

And every time, his bullets veer wide.

Thinking that way will get him killed, out here. And so, he doesn’t think.

But then his deployment is over, and he finds himself on leave between tours, and he has to think, carefully, about what to do next.

Fedya’s mother, unable to keep up with the spiraling rent, has moved to Moscow, where both the quality and prices of apartments are lower. The Kuragin home is still in Petersburg, of course, but he cannot justify turning his back on his mother for that.

To his surprise, he finds Hélène in Moscow. She has married, a slow, studious fellow with wire-rimmed spectacles to whom she is spectacularly ill-suited. She is wildly unhappy, and he is lonely, and so they fall into an easy sort of intimacy. Never anything more than friends, whatever Moscow thinks.

Each of them satisfy something the other needs.

He can be cruel and stay up until sunrise and match her drink for drink, three things her sleepy, cow-eyed husband cannot manage.

And she looks like her brother, which, for now, will do.

#

Four months after Fedya arrives in Moscow, Hélène invites Fedya to join her at the opera. Her husband cannot go, or refuses to, and she resents the shame of having to appear alone.

He looks at her sideways—does she remember the last time they shared an opera box? It doesn’t seem so. Of course, for her, that night was one among many. Another night her family put on evening dress and pearls and pretended nothing was wrong, while fresh bruises rose on Anatole’s neck.

She invites him again, more insistently this time, and Fedya cannot help but agree.

He doesn’t know how they do it, the Kuragins, but they make it impossible to say no.

As they enter, Moscow’s eyes turn to them in a single, incredulous wave. He can feel their surprise, and finds himself luxuriating in it. Let them be surprised, that a poor man and a soldier and a brute from the Petersburg slums can take the arm of Moscow’s most compelling woman. It satisfies him, though not one person among them is drawing the correct conclusions. He finds himself wondering whether he should kiss Hélène there under the lights of the opera, if only to give these society ladies something to talk about on the troika ride home.

He decides, at the last minute, against it.

Their seats are in the front row, so close he could reach out and touch the stage. Hélène glances over her shoulder toward the doors, repeatedly, as though she is waiting for someone. When Fedya questions her, she shrugs, a small smile in her eyes. He huffs, turns away, ignores her. He has not come here to play games, though Hélène seems content to play on her own.

The first act passes. He is bored—the army has not improved his musicality, and the story seems deliberately opaque, as if to punish him for agreeing to the invitation. He plays with the hem of his uniform, rolling and unrolling it between his fingertips. He cannot seem to stop.

Then a rush of cold air whispers across his neck. Despite himself, he turns.

And there is Anatole, walking down the aisle of the opera house, and Fedya is seventeen years old again surrounded by the height of Petersburg society, and the air has been sucked out of the room, someone has cut his lungs to pieces and Fedya cannot _breathe._

Three years have changed Anatole. He is even taller now, and more solid in the shoulders, though still lean, still graceful. It as if someone has gone over his boyhood silhouette with charcoal, strengthening his lines, emboldening his presence. Clean-shaven still, he has adopted a new way of wearing his hair—a frankly ridiculous one, it adds two inches to his already considerable height.

He wears a military uniform, which stuns Fedya at first. Has Anatole fought? Can Anatole fight? Has a man ever worn the drab green of the Imperial Army that way before? Anatole wears his uniform as if it were evening dress. From his ease, it is as if all noble gentlemen wear sword and spurs, as a generation ago they wore spurious monocles, for the fashion of it.

His eyes, across the room, glitter.

Three years have changed Anatole.

Anatole has not changed at all.

Beside him, Hélène smirks, and Fedya is suddenly quite certain why she asked him to escort her tonight.

Anatole slings himself into the open seat beside Fedya and smiles. His brilliant teeth shine bright through the dark, enchanting and alarming, like bone through soot.

“Fedya,” he says, and leans over to embrace him. “You kept your promise.”

Fedya opens his mouth, but only the creaking beginnings of words emerge. Language. He is a human. He possesses it. At least, at one point he did.

“So did you,” he says.

He takes Anatole’s hand, knowing only that it feels right to, not caring what anyone around them thinks. The gesture causes Anatole’s sleeve to slink upward. Fedya feels a shiver of memory—they have been here before, exactly here. A thin, horizontal scar bisects the perfect skin of Anatole’s wrist. Raised like a vein. Fedya cannot guess how old it is. It wasn’t there when he left.

“I told you I can take care of myself,” Anatole says.

Fedya has nothing to say. Softly, he presses his mouth to the inside of Anatole’s wrist, feeling the ridge of the scar against his lips. It seems easier than speaking.

Anatole smiles softly, amused. Not understanding. Not thinking.

“I should have been there for you,” Fedya says.

Anatole shakes his head. As he speaks, the lights come up for intermission, and he allows the volume of his voice to rise. “You’re here now,” he says. “That’s all I want.”

By this, Anatole doesn’t mean what Fedya needs him to mean.

Anatole means _I’m glad you’re back._

Anatole means _You always tried to protect me, and no one in the world could do more, and I couldn’t have asked you to._

Anatole means _I’ve missed you._

Anatole means _You’re my best friend._

Anatole does not mean _You’re here now, and you are all I want, because I love you._

Anatole can’t mean that.

Fedya needs him to mean it.

Fedya has spent his life trying to protect Anatole. He has not succeeded, but he has tried, in his way. To shield Anatole from the cruelty of the world, or, if not that, to show him another world, one with fewer cruel things to fear. One where parents protect you, and the world hums with music, and nothing can truly hurt you, not for long.

Somehow, along the way, Fedya has forgotten to protect himself.

They watch the rest of the opera in silence.

By the end of the final act, Fedya finds that his eyes are wet with tears. He could not explain why with a gun to his head.

The lights come up, and Anatole smiles.

“Come on, _mon ami,_ ” he says. “You look like you could use a drink.”

Fedya could use more than that. But a drink is a start.

Together, they spill out into the cold Moscow night, three shadows under the stars. Anatole holds Fedya’s hand, has wrapped his other arm around Hélène’s waist.

Somehow, it feels like none of them are touching.


End file.
